The Laughing Man

Rembrandt was in his early twenties and still in his home town of Leiden when he made this small, grinning head. It is a tronie, not a portrait of anyone in particular but a study of an expression and a face, the kind of thing he made to practise catching a fleeting look. What makes it unusual is underneath. He painted it on a small copper plate covered in gold leaf, and in places he scratched back through the wet paint with the end of his brush to let that warm ground flash through the hair. The handling is startlingly loose for so early a work, already reaching for the roughness he became famous for decades later. Around this time he was sharing a Leiden studio with his friend Jan Lievens, the two of them competing head to head.